(Source : The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri)
Gogol did not date anyone in high school. He suffered quiet crushes, which he admitted to no one, on this girl or that girl with whom he was already friends. He did not attend dances or parties. He and his group of friends, Colin and Jason and Marc, preferred to listen to records together, to Dylan and Clapton and The Who, and read Nietzsche in their spare time. His parents did not find it strange that their son didn't date, did not rent a tuxedo for his junior prom. They had never been on a date in their lives and therefore they saw no reason to encourage Gogol, certainly not at his age. Instead they urged him to join the math team and maintain his A average. His father pressed him to pursue engineering, perhaps at MIT. Assured by his grades and his apparent indifference to girls, his parents did not suspect Gogol of being, in his own fumbling way, an American teenager. They didn't suspect him, for instance, of smoking pot, which he did from time to time when he and his friends get together to listen to records at one another's homes. They didn't suspect him, when he went to spend the night at a friend's house, of driving to a neighboring town to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show, or into Boston to see bands in Kenmore Square.
One Saturday, soon before he was scheduled to take the SAT, his family drove to Connecticut for the weekend, leaving Gogol at home alone overnight for the first time in his life. It never crossed his parents' minds that instead of taking timed practice tests in his room, Gogol would drive with Colin and Jason and Marc to a party. They were invited by Colin's older brother, who was a freshman at the university where Gogol's father teaches. He dressed for the party as he normally did, in Levi's and boat shoes and a checkered flannel shirt. For all the times he'd been to the campus, to visit his father at the engineering department, he had never been in a dorm before. They approached nervously, a bit giddy, afraid to be caught. "If anyone asks, my brother said to say we're freshmen at Amherst," Colin advised them in the car.
The party occupied an entire hallway, the doors of the individual rooms all open. They entered the first room they could manage to, crowded, dark, hot. No one noticed as Gogol and his three friends made their way across the room to the keg. For a while, they stood in a circle, holding their plastic cups of beer, shouting over the music in order to be heard. But then Colin saw his brother in the hallway, and Jason needed to find a bathroom, and Marc needed another beer already. Gogol drifted into the hallway as well. Everyone seemed to know everyone else, embroiled in conversations that were impossible to join. Music playing from the different rooms mingled unpleasantly in Gogol's ears. He felt too wholesome in this ripped jeans and T-shirt crowd, feared his hair was too recently washed and was too neatly combed. And yet it didn't seem to matter, no one seemed to care. At the end of the hallway, he climbed a set of stairs, and at the top there was another hallway, equally crowded and loud. In the corner he saw a couple kissing, pressed up against the wall. Instead of pushing his way through to the other end of the hallway, he decided to climb another set of stairs. This time the hallway was deserted, an expanse of dark blue carpeting and whiten wooden doors. The only presence in the space was the sound of muffled music and voices coming from below. He was about to turn back down the staircase when one of the doors opened and a girl emerged, a pretty, slender girl wearing a buttoned-up polka-dotted thrift store dress and scuffed Doc Martens. She had short, dark brown hair, curving in toward her cheeks and cut in a high fringe over her brows. Her face was heart-shaped, her lips painted a glamorous red.
"Sorry," Gogol said. "Am I not supposed to be up here ?"
"Well, it's technically a girl's floor," the girl said. "But that's never stopped a guy before." She studied him thoughtfully, as no other girl had looked at him. "You don't go here, do you ?"
"No," he said, his heart pounding. And then he remembered his surreptitious identity for the evening : "I'm a freshman at Amherst."
"That's cool," the girl said, walking toward him. "I'm Kim."
"Nice to meet you." He extended his hand, and Kim shook it, a bit longer than necessary. For a moment she looked at him expectantly, then smiled, revealing two front teeth that were slightly overlapping.
"Come on," she said. "I can show you around." They walked together down the staircase. She lead him to a room where she got herself a beer and he poured himself another. He stood awkwardly at her side as she paused to say hello to friends. They worked their way to a common area where there was a television, a Coke machine, a shabby sofa, and an assortment of chairs. They sat on the sofa, slouching, a considerable space between them. Kim noticed a stray pack of cigarettes on the coffee table and lighted one.
"Well ?" she said , turning back to him, somewhat suspiciously this time.
"What ?"
"Aren't you going to introduce yourself to me ?"
"Oh," he said. "Yeah." But he didn't want to tell Kim his name. He didn't want to endure her reaction, to watch her lovely blue eyes grow wide. He wished there were another name he could use, to get him through the evening. It wouldn't be so terrible. He'd lied to her already, about being at Amherst. There were a million names to choose from. But then he realized there was no need to lie. Not technically. He remembered the other name that had once been chosen for him, the one that should have been.
"I'm Nikhil," he said for the first time in his life. He said it tentatively, his voice sounding strained to his ears. He looked at Kim, his eyebrows furrowed, prepared for her to challenge him, to correct him, to laugh in his face. He held his breath. His face tingled, whether from triumph or terror he wasn't sure.
But Kim accepted gladly. "Nikhil," she said, blowing a thin plume of smoke toward the ceiling. Again she turned to him and smiled. "Nikhil," she repeated. "I've never heard that before. That's a lovely name."
They sat awhile longer, the conversation continuing, Gogol stunned at how easy it was. His mind floated ; he only half listened as Kim talked about her classes, about the town in Connecticut where she was from. He felt at once guilty and exhilarated, protected as if by an invisible shield. Because he knew he would never see her again, he was brave that evening, kissing her lightly on the mouth as she was talking to him, his leg pressing gently against her leg on the sofa, briefly running a hand through her hair. It was the first time he'd kissed anyone, the first time he'd felt a girl's face and body and breath so close to his own. "I can't believe you have kissed her, Gogol," his friends exclaimed as they drove home from the party. "It wasn't me," he nearly said. But he didn't tell them that it had not been Gogol who'd kissed Kim. That Gogol had had nothing to do with it.
No comments:
Post a Comment